Rain puts a damper on activities at Wrightsville Beach in July 2014. StarNews file photo
Q. Do they keep the rain gauge at Wilmington airport under an umbrella? This area has been inundated with rain over the past few days. The entire region is under a flood watch. My own rain gauge has recorded nearly 10 inches from Friday to Monday, Aug. 4. Yet the statistics in the Almanac have shown only about 0.5 inches each of the last two days. How can that be?
A. It’s largely due to the scattered nature of summer storms, according to Brad Reinhart, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington.
“You can get very heavy rainfall right over an area where the thunderstorm is, but if the coverage isn’t widespread, you’re going to have totals that look kind of funny on a map,” he said.
The number of official observation stations monitored by the National Weather Service is limited, both financially and logistically. The service does run a volunteer observer network known as CoCoRaHS – Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network – and members of the public can browse that data at www.cocorahs.org.
RELATED LINKS:
Are there official rain measuring stations in the region other than ILM?
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Why did the weather service reuse the name Bertha? We’ve already had a Bertha.
Date posted: August 8, 2014
User-contributed question by:
Paul Scott
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